


what makes a feanorian

by secretfeanorian



Series: the worst things in life come free to us [3]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Character Study, all feanorians are mentioned, more remembering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 17:02:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1557677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretfeanorian/pseuds/secretfeanorian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can't decide on the reason he won't draw his father.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what makes a feanorian

_…vengeance, though sweet at first, becomes a bitter cup and proves to be its own executioner.  
_

* * *

He said once that a feanorian was a good and a bad person, that a feanorian was someone one believes the end justifies the means. He had then said that he was a feanorian. But after that, he’d contradicted his first statement by the saying the ends couldn’t justify the means, that there was no possible end that could justify their methods of getting there. He’s not quite sure why he had said that.  
  
He now has a family name and faces and names to match, if not all, then most of the faces in his mind, and his memories are no longer entirely absent. But now he wants to know what a feanorian is. Beyond simple definitions, he wants to know what caused the feanorians to become so well known.  
  
He has regained most of his family, but among those he still cannot remember is his father. Some things about his father he can remember, but overall his father is a blurry smear in his head. And he hates that. His father was complex and brilliant and caring, but he has no memories of that pre-oath bliss. The only memories he has of his father are grainy pictures of fire and blood and betrayal and death. He knows it is because of his father that he is here in this wretched place that is not home and could never be home, but for some reason, whenever the blame creeps up from one corner of his mind, another screams its vengeful disagreement.  
  
He has come to the conclusion that for some reason, he feels pressured to blame his father for his struggles, but his mindset on the matter is that he will not blame his father for what was directly caused by his own shortcomings.  
  
Some days, he tries to draw his father, but never gets past the sharp cheekbones and the defensive glare he wore when he was being protective. He doesn’t know why he can’t get past these details. He thinks it might be because he’s afraid he won’t remember his father’s face. More terrifying is the thought that he might draw a stranger’s face – a familiar stranger, but a stranger nonetheless – and not realize his mistake.  
  
He sketches an outline of his father, the shadow of his face, his hair, his hands, his lips drawn to a smile or a smirk, but he never tries to draw the face that had watched him grow up. He’s beginning to think it might be because he might draw his father’s face – correct in every detail – and look at it and know it no better than he might any random civilian.  
  
He fills a book with rejected drawings and then stops. He thinks he wants to reclaim his father, but he also thinks he’s not quite ready to. He focuses on his brothers. He can remember them. Some events are blurred and some he thinks contain people that were not there, but them he remembers. It is no struggle to draw their faces and he does so, over and over and over again. He fills a book with memories of his brothers. He gets another one. That one is filled up by the end of the next month. So he gets another one. The cycle repeats itself for a year or so.  
  
Halfway through that year, he starts to draw the rest of his family. His cousins, his in-laws, his nephews, his wife, his two sons and daughter, his aunts, his uncles, his mother, his grandparents. At the eleventh month he begins drawing friends. Friends in Valinor, friends in Beleriand. He draws Elrond and Elros, in their childhood, in their prime. He draws Elrond in the Third Age, counseling the world, tired and sad and alone. He draws Elros at the end of his life, old and fragile and used up. He weeps and those final two drawings are ripped from the sketchbook and thrown across the room.  
  
Still, however, he does not draw his father. He draws horses, fast and proud and strong. He draws wolfhounds, loyal and fierce and good. Too good for them. He draws Himring, cold and lonely and quiet. He draws Fingolfin and Morgoth’s duel. He draws Nirnaeth Arnoediad. He doesn’t know why he’d endeavor to remember that. He draws Maedhros after that disaster, sad and broken and empty. The self-inflected scars on his older brother’s face make him sick, even now.  
  
He rips it up. Maedhros was so visibly broken then and the world could not think that Maedhros was anything but strong. He was strong, he wasn’t anything but strong. But no one ever saw that strength was never about how much one could take before they broke, but rather how much they could take after they broke. He thinks he’s quoting something when he says that. He’s not sure. He taps the sketch back together and hides it under his pillow. Maedhros was never weak, but everyone has a weakest point. No one deserved to see his older brother at his.  
  
Still, he doesn’t draw his father. He now realizes that it isn’t for any of the reasons he had previously considered, but it was rather a crushing fear of looking for his father and finding only the monster that grief had created.  
  
He does not deny that his father had become something of a monster and that his sons had followed him in an attempt to keep him safe and had in turn become the monsters carrying out his grief-driven mission themselves. Not entirely heartless monsters, but monsters none the less. He does deny, however, that no one else would’ve been willing to do what they had done. The difference was that they had been in a position to be able to do it. They had been royalty and his father had been the high king after his father’s murder.  
  
The Noldor had not been few, the Noldor had been many. True, the number of Noldor following his father had been a small percentage of the host as a whole, but that did not mean that they weren’t numerous when viewed alone. And their skill had been a force to be reckoned with. These had not been inexperienced children waving sticks around. Morgoth’s whispers and lies had woken enough discord to ensure that.  
  
Maglor thinks some people would view that as a good thing. Maglor is not sure he would agree with them if asked. It ensured far too much blood shed in civil war. Overall, he thinks it might have been worth it, but even if it was, the freedom it bought took centuries to be received and the cost had been absurdly high.  
  
Not to say that the amount of deaths had been unexpected. Far from it. That problem lay in the deliverer of a fair percentage of that death. Elf killing elf, dwarf killing elf, elf killing dwarf and so on, instead of Morgoth killing elf or dwarf or man. Some of that death had been needless and wasteful. All death was wasteful, but in war against evil it is also necessary. Some wars are not even necessary on the largest of scales. Maglor does not think the war against Morgoth was unnecessary, but the smaller elf against elf wars on the sidelines were.  
  
He’s an excellent fighter. He always has been. He’s a killer. He hates that. He dislikes fighting in general. He would fight if needed, but it never a pastime he would actively seek out. He thinks his father may have felt the same way about killing things once…before…the Darkening. There is no doubt about the word’s capitalization, though he’s not sure why or what the Darkening was. He figures it had something to do with the murder of his grandfather since that was what had caused his father to go mad with grief and what memories he possesses seem to indicate that the two had been related in some way. _I’ll figure that out one day_ , he thinks and draws a palace garden.  
  
That one day came only a month later when he picked up a sketch of Curufin in the forge and thought he was looking at a picture of his father. _The Darkening happened after grandfather was murdered_ , he thinks. _Morgoth murdered him and then destroyed the Two Trees_ , he remembers. He draws the two blackened husks that Ungoliant had left behind. _I am a prince_ , he says aloud and almost believes it.  
  
Still, he doesn’t draw his father. It’s no longer because he’s afraid he won’t remember his face, he just can’t find the courage to do it. He thinks it’s now because he sees drawing his father as a way of accepting that the man who raised him is gone forever, with quite possibly no hope of return from the monster he had become. He tries not to cry.  
  
He cries into his pillow that night all the same. _Weak_ , he tells himself, trying to imagine his father saying it, but all he gets is the memory of a strong and gentle hand on his shoulder and a voice above him whispering _I love you so much Macalaure. And you are not weak. You are so strong. You are stronger than I could ever hope to be.  
  
_ Maglor cries for hours and hours and he can’t stop himself. He doesn’t try. He’s remembered his family and now the lingering ache in his soul is so much more painful. _Ada_ , he thinks, _Feanaro.  
  
_ He draws his father, finally. He takes an enormous canvas and he sketches and he draws and he paints. The gentle teasing tilt of Feanaro’s eyebrow and his loving smile stare down at Maglor and his tears are now tears of relief for the face smiling down at him is his father’s and how could he have ever forgotten the love shining through every part of his father’s face.  
  
He draws his father’s forge, he draws his mother’s sculpting office, he draws the lake Maedhros always took him (and later Fingon) to, he draws Celegorm’s bow and he draws Orome’s hunt, he draws Caranthir’s loom, Curufin’s forge, he draws the twins with their heads together plotting something and finally; finally, he draws the Silmarils.  
  
When he’s finished with that drawing, he looks at the three jewels that had supposedly caused so much pain and he says, _it was never for you. For Atar, it was revenge for Finwe’s murder. For us, it was for our father._ He burns that drawing all the same. _The world would’ve been better without them in it nonetheless_ , he thinks, and the Feanaro he remembers agrees with him.


End file.
